A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and is now does marketing for Wiley. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year (and he's doing it again now!). He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Jen Yates, Wreck the Halls(3/17)
I neglected to write anything about this at the time, and it's since either gone back to the library or upstairs to my Cake Wrecks-loving younger son. (I don't remember exactly.) But what is there to say? It's a collection of pictures of professional cakes with things very, very wrong with them -- either conceptually, grammatically, or just physically -- with excellent and funny captions by Yates. Unlike the first book, this one has a narrower focus -- cakes for some holiday or other -- but that's still broad enough for a lot of pictures of some seriously wrong confections. If you like the blog, you'll like the book. And, if you don't like the blog, you're probably a professional cake decorator with some serious problems.

George O'Connor, Hades: Lord of the Dead (3/18)
Another book I forgot to write about before it disappeared -- this one has been sucked into the collection of my older son, who's the mythology buff of the house. But it's just as good a retelling of Greek myth -- this time, mostly Persephone, with a few other things about Hades included as well -- as the earlier books, so see my reviews of Zeus, Athena, and Hera for more details. This is a great series, and not just for kids: O'Connor does a wonderful job of retelling myths so that they resonate for audiences of various ages.

Coming up this next month: I'm really not sure. I used to have my reading life closely planned out (an artifact of the bookclub days, when I'd know, pretty much, what the next half-dozen books I'd read for work would be, and basically the order.) I'm in the middle of Rule 34 and I might follow that up with Embassytown, just to keep abreast of the novels that Christopher Priest finds so very, very unworthy.